WESTLAND, Mass. When Wendy Alpicka gets tired of the music she exercises to, she calls on Norman Rouse, a twenty-year old next door neighbor who sometimes babysits her two young sons. “Norman’s great, he’s a deejay for his college radio station, so he keeps up on the new trends,” she says, gasping for breath as she pumps away at her Flabbaciser 200 “elliptical” machine, which she bought so she could squeeze in a home workout when her fitness club is closed.
“You’re digging it? Cool!”
Rouse is a music business major at Emerson College in Boston, and so he takes a personal interest in monitoring industry shifts. “For some reason, suburban housewives don’t buy much gangster rap, despite the sincere efforts of young music critics to persuade them they need to if they want to be considered cool,” he says as he scrolls down the index of songs he’s saved to his laptop. “I put together a playlist for Mrs. Alpicki that reflects who she is, and the mean streets she has to drive everyday looking for parking near the stores she likes.”
Out of that unlikely youth-adult initiative has grown “Songs of Practical Romance”–a sub-sub-genre designed to rekindle flames of romance that female listeners recall from their teens and twenties, without burning down a $1.5 million “starter home” in a suburb with a good school system.
Starland Vocal Band
When this reporter asks to hear a few samples the female half of the unlikely May-August duo presses “Play” on her phone, and through the magic of Bluetooth technology the strains of “Let’s Brush Our Teeth and Have Sex” begin to fill her finished basement from designer speakers. “It’s sort of a variation on ‘Afternoon Delight,’” Rouse says, referring to the gag-inducing 1976 hit for the Starland Vocal Band. “There’s this couple and they’re thinking of having sex in the morning,” Wendy says, “but they care enough that they don’t want to inflict dog breath on each other.”
The playlist segues into “Not Tonight, I Just Washed the Sheets,” a song that reflects the sad truth of living in an exurban town with minimum acre-and-a-half zoning. “We’re don’t have municipal sewers out here, so I can only do one load of wash a day,” she says. “I told Bob–my husband–that some nights he’s just going to have to play with himself, I can’t have the septic tank overflowing.”
When that bluesy lament ends, the tempo heats up a bit with “Be Careful (I Didn’t Shave My Legs),” a dance tune by Iris Bogaard, a twenty-something chanteuse from the Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston, known as its “student ghetto.” “It’s both a feminist manifesto, and a song of warning,” Rouse says, and Alpicki nods her head to the pulsating rhythm, then adds by way of agreement “It’s a jungle down there unless you keep the underbrush mowed.”